Page 43 of The End of the World As We Know It

“I don’t know. I’m thinking people get a real comparison, they’ll go Beta.”

“They got a real comparison. They went VHS.”

“Yeah. I guess. Hey, you been keeping up on current events?”

“What’d you mean?”

“There’s been rioting on the far side of town,” Shelly the Shit said. “Some serious business, amigo.”

“Why would that be? You sure?”

“I’m sure. There’s them getting so sick that people say there could be an epidemic. People are so scared they’re tearing stuff up and stealing. Epidemic? Shit. I don’t believe it. I mean, I feel fine. You?”

“Yeah. I’m all right.”

It was as if on cue, Shelly the Shit cleared his throat. “That’s nothing,” Shelly said. “A tickle.”

At home, Ricky warmed up some soup and had a bit of that with crackers while he watched the news. He switched around channels. This time of night, ought to have been movies and late shows about this and that, info-commercials, but the news was all that was on.

There was a panicked feel to all of it. A lot of people were sick, and rumor was an epidemic was about to be declared. The newsrooms all made a point of mentioning that most of their staff was out. One newscaster, a young blond lady, had a red sheen to her nose and her eyes looked watery.

The red-nosed lady showed a clip of army trucks moving into the East Texas town of Nacogdoches, not far from Mud Creek, where Ricky lived, and that gave him a feeling of unsteadiness. Martial law was being declared, or at least that was what was being said, but solid confirmation was yet to happen.

Ricky’d had enough. He turned off the TV. Maybe tomorrow things would be sorted, and it would turn out to be a series of isolated incidents.

While brushing his teeth, he checked to see if his tongue was coated with sickness. Nada. Eyes looked clear. No muscle aches, coughs, or leaky nose. He was fine. Just fine.

He went to his second-floor-apartment window and looked out at the street. Empty as an orphan’s stocking on Christmas morning.

Well, it was late and Mud Creek was small, but it was an odd sort of emptiness. It was almost as if that emptiness had weight.

It was the kind of emptiness one could imagine if lost in a night sea without a boat, only one’s legs and arms to paddle. Full dark around you, rolling seas and something underwater brushing against your feet.

A feeling of falling from an airplane during a storm without a parachute. All your life and accomplishments of no more importance than shit flushed down a toilet.

Slight variations on a theme. But in the end, all the same. Life didn’t give awards or medals in the end. It was just the end.

Ricky pulled his curtains and went to bed.

In the late morning there came the sound of metal impacting metal, a clatter of what might have been an escaping hubcap rolling down the street.

Ricky, dressed only in his underwear, got up and went to the window, looked out at the street. Lights, a gathering of people around a mashed-up Buick stuck into a mashed-up Chevy. There were cop car lights.

Ricky pulled on some clothes and his shoes and went out to join the lookie-loo crowd. People, mostly in nightclothes, were gathered around the wreck.

What he saw wasn’t so much about the wreck as it was about the man in the car. He was dark with a pus-filled infection. His throat looked like a tire that had been over-aired and was ready to pop. His eyes bulged like boiled eggs. The car smelled of vomit, blood, and shit.

With no less effort than pushing an elephant up a waterslide, the man in the car opened his eyes and turned his head. He was looking right at Ricky, who stood on the side of the driver’s window. He couldn’t tell if the man was actually looking at him or at nothing at all.

The man opened his mouth and a thick gob of yellow pasty stuffrolled out of it, dripped over his chin, and dropped off. His eyes were sticky with what looked like Elmer’s Glue.

“There’s a woman in the back seat,” someone said.

Sure enough, there was. Ricky eased up closer and saw her lying there. She looked like a scarecrow that had been used for a piñata.

“It’s the disease,” someone else said.

Ricky turned as he heard sniffling and coughing, and even a clinging-sounding fart. The crowd, in the streetlight, looked like a fucking leper colony; faces swollen, lips swollen, most of them dripping from their noses. A few had turned to vomit in the street. A few had swollen necks.